The Art of Surrender: Embracing the Unexpected Power of Letting Go

#movingahead #future #delegating #leadership #innovation #changemanagement #lettinggo #newsolutions #2024growth

Business executives are used to control.  They like to reduce business situations to a set of problems with numbers and variables, and then to control the variables.  Letting go of the variables is anathema to them, because that means they might be letting go of the outcome. 

Yet, we must let go sometimes.   In making a leap you must leave the solid ground, and in reaching to the next step you must leave the one you are standing on.     

In business, pivoting to a new direction or business model means leaving the old one behind.  It’s very hard to resist the idea that if we just try a little harder, we can make the old model work in a new set of conditions.  Over my Marketing career I have lost count of the number of times I sat in a meeting and heard that we just need a little bit broader distribution, a slightly deeper discount, or a new reason to get consumers to believe our product claims.   

Instead, we should always be thinking about what constraints and models we should be letting go.

I am pursuing a Certificate in Art Therapy with the belief that art can be used to create better business – that is, businesses with higher share, greater customer loyalty, and superior customer value. 

Go With The Flow

I attended a workshop where the leader told us that we were about to create beauty by letting go.  She asked us to close our eyes and breathe deep, and to embrace to idea that we aren’t really in control of much of our world, but that we could create beauty in any circumstance.

We then took paint, squeezed it onto tiles, and then tipped the tiles in different directions.  I set out with the idea that I was going to create a series of concentric circles of color.  Here is what I made instead:

Sometimes, when we let go of our preconceived ideas of how something must be done, or what a result should be, we find ourselves making an entirely new approach, or entering an entirely different market, or embracing an entirely new way of thinking.

I invite you to try it. Feel the fear in letting go, and enjoy the beauty of what happens.

Unlocking Creativity: The Power Of Art To Transform Your Mind

The Power Of Imagination

Albert Einstein once said "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all that will ever be to know and understand."

But how can we deliberately and predictably tap into that well of imagination? Is there a prescription for how we can all access it?

I am pursuing a Certificate in Art Therapy with the belief that art can be used to create better business – that is, businesses with higher share, greater customer loyalty, and superior customer value.

To back up, I am a Senior Marketing Executive with the great fortune to work for some of the most well-known brands across a range of industries. These have included, for example, Kay Jewelers, Crest Toothpaste, Pantene Hair Care, Cover Girl, Rubbermaid, Goodyear, and Ralph Lauren. I have also worked for smaller and startup companies.

Succeeding In Business Is Hard

My experience is that solving the complex problems of business calls for a great deal of creativity and melding together different viewpoints.

However, decisions must also be supported with facts, and often the factual, logical discussion overwhelms the nonverbal creative thinking. Thus, the company squelches the very thinking process which they vitally need.

So, what are specific methods to help unleash imaginative, creative thinking?

Get Out The PlayDough

The market changes, and successful companies transform their business model to deliver what the market desires. In 2018, three scientists hypothesized that clay work could be used to enhance readiness to change, as clay work by nature is about transforming one form into another. So here's the test they designed:

All participants were given clay which they modeled into anchors. Then, one group remodeled the anchor into sculptures of boats, which was intended to symbolize transformation, while the other group remodeled the anchor back into a ball, which was intended to symbolize being stuck. Afterward, each participant’s readiness to change was measured by the URICA Readiness To Change assessment.

The results showed a statistically significant difference in the level of change readiness between the people who transformed the anchor into a boat, as compared to the people who transformed the anchor into a ball. They also spoke longer to the therapist after the clay exercise, indicating a higher engagement in transforming their behavior.

So, keep a few jars of playdough on hand for your team. They might come in handy.

Are You Marketing By Vending Machine?

Avoid putting your Digital Marketing on autopilot.

Improve your Digital Marketing business results. Apply 5 strategies to include broader Marketing competencies along with your Digital Marketing performance metrics.

There are dangers in decision making using Digital Marketing metrics in a silo. Let’s call it Marketing By Vending Machine. Imagine a marketer standing in front of a media vending machine, ready for their afternoon ad purchase. They know if they put a certain amount of money in at the top, a specific number of people will be exposed to their ad. A percent of that audience will click on the ad to go to their website, where in turn a percent of the website traffic will click on the product, and a percent of the product clickers will buy the product. Multiply that final number by the unit price, and revenue falls out the bottom, just like a candy bar. Sweet, right? If you don’t get the revenue you want, just put more money in at the top. Really, a monkey could probably do it – and today’s very complex version of a monkey, which we call AI, can definitely do it.

Why Worry?

The danger is wasting Marketing resources -- time and money. But even beyond that, unless we are careful, the bedrock foundation of effective Marketing can be eroded: our core competency and collective passion in knowing the customer, figuring out what they are looking for, and determining how to talk to them about it.

Watch Out: Trying To Increase The Bottom Line By Looking At The Bottom Line

Marketing By Vending Machine can cause us to spend our valuable time trying to increase the impact of our marketing efforts by looking at the impact itself, which is inefficient at best and nonsensical at worst. If you just said “huh?” in your mind, you’re on the right track. There is a veritable flood of metrics available to track performance based Digital Marketing. However, the flood generally trickles down to figuring out which combination of time, channel, product, message, and audience delivers the highest ROI. When we see a high ROI, we double down on that combination.

The unfortunate reality is that what was the highest ROI last week is often not the highest ROI the following week. In response, we flex our spending to the new high ROI combination. And the cycle goes on. If we don’t stop and ask why the ROI is what it is, we can end up going in circles, trying to improve the bottom number by focusing on the bottom number.

Watch Out: Unintentionally Eroding Your Brand Promise

Marketing By Vending Machine has the potential to obscure the long-term value of a truly relevant brand message. The most reliable path to short term revenue is usually to advertise a lower price for a limited time. This triggers a sense of urgency in the consumer to act at the bottom of the purchase funnel. So, no matter what your industry, the ad which offers the highest discount in the shortest time is likely one of your highest ROI ads.

However, we know that price promotion can devalue our brand over time. Overuse of price promotion reduces the intangible brand promise to a simple price tag. Lower brand value leads to lower profit, which leads to lower shareholder return. Marketing By Vending Machine can keep us addicted to the bottom of the funnel, where we have the fewest number of options to truly change the consumer opinion of our brand.

Watch Out: Talking Without Translating

Marketing has always had its own set of words. In fact, so has each function, and we have always needed to translate to each other to get to a common understanding of a particular issue. Marketing By Vending Machine has amplified the translation difficulty by a thousandfold. Sometimes, the message that the Digital Marketing team is intending to communicate to other functions gets lost inside the numbers, abbreviations, and acronyms.

The more cynical audience might even conclude that this is a deliberate behavior by Digital Marketers to keep the other functions at arm's length. It can work this way, as other functions get frustrated and withdraw from the conversation. Digital Marketers rarely communicate this way on purpose, but it happens in discussions every day, and the customer loses because of it.

Watch Out: Debating The Wrong Subject

Within the application of Marketing By Vending Machine, the conversation can meander off the most important topics. Because Digital Marketing is highly metric driven, our conversation can become about what we can measure more than why we want to measure that in the first place. Because nearly all performance measurement metrics are backward looking, we talk more about yesterday than tomorrow.

Most dangerous of all, because we create audiences using algorithms, who we are talking to can get reduced to a set of IP addresses. We may not have the critical discourse on which consumer insights we can use to create products people want and what compelling messages to use to drive loyalty to our brand. We may not spend time hypothesizing what we could offer to serve the customer better. In fact, we may not even be communicating at all with our peers, so we lose the ability to get everyone engaged in the effort to satisfy the customer.

The Way Forward

So, what are we to do? Here are five suggestions:

1. Visit The Consumer Regularly

Physically put aside your screen and go to wherever and whenever your customers are purchasing and using your product or service. Get to know them as a person, not an IP address, and do it several times a year. There is an adage that customers cannot tell you about something they don’t know they need, they can only tell you what is wrong with your current product, but this is not true. They will tell you. They just won’t say it in words. Look for compensatory behaviors – how they are adjusting their own behavior to compensate for what the market doesn’t provide. Observational research is powerful.

Once my team did this exercise with Rubbermaid. We noticed that a consumer stored her wrapping paper vertically in a tall thin box in her basement by the water heater. When we asked her why she did this, the customer answered that she didn’t have underbed horizontal storage areas. Voila. The Vertical Wrap ‘n Craft was born. Almost 25 years and hundreds of millions of dollars later, it’s still a popular item.

2. Widen The Narrowest Point Of The Funnel

Certainly, find the highest ROI path. But don’t stop there. Take the extra ten minutes to look up the funnel of that purchase and see where the most significant customer drop off is happening. In other words, which part of the vending machine operation is limiting the revenue? Figure out how to open that funnel just a little wider so you increase the percent of people who make it from one step to another. Different tactics work at different stages of the funnel. Don’t just put more money into the highest ROI path. Change the highest ROI path to be even higher.

3. Keep Developing A Consumer-Relevant Brand Message

I have worked in industries from diamond rings to truck tires, and there is one person I always want to get to know: the one who spends the money. As a Marketing function, we must obsess over how to reach that person in the most persuasive way possible. But how to attack such a broad topic? Start by digging into the behavior of people who buy your product when it is at its most expensive. These are likely to be the most loyal and least price sensitive customers. They are your gold mine. Set up an ongoing consumer panel with them through which you can ask about motivations, behaviors, attitudes, test new ideas, and ask for suggestions.

4. Speak In Words Everyone Understands

At a dinner event I attended the other day, the guests spoke many different languages. Most of the guests had some understanding of the other languages, but English was the only language all the people had in common. During quick side conversations, such as one person asking their partner to pass the salt, they generally spoke in their native language. But for conversations in which all participated, we spoke English. It seems like a good model. When we are talking to our fellow Digital Marketers, it is faster to speak in the shorthand we know. When we are trying to bring in other functions, we must move to a more universal language.

5. Listen To Your Right Brain

Digital Marketing is all about metrics, but some things that can be measured don’t matter, and some things that do matter can’t be measured. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify the “unmeasurables” are so they can be discussed. Scientists have validated that while the entire brain works together, certain processes happen in specific brain hemispheres. The left brain receptors process numbers, logic, and the ability to speak. The right brain receptors process has intuition, connection, emotion, art, music, and so on.

We mostly use our right brain during the normal course of the day because it’s faster. For example, we see a red light and we stop. We don’t process it, talk about it, and then act on it, or we would probably have traffic gridlock more often. But during business conversations, our left brain functions are dominant, overshadowing the right brain, which unfortunately has fewer words. That doesn’t mean it’s not communicating with you, however. Pay attention to how you feel. If something isn’t sitting well with you, stop and allow the thought to come to the surface.

Wrapping It Up

Use and become an expert in Digital Marketing. It’s measurable, targeted, and fast. The vending machine is powerful and evolving every day. Marketers without deep Digital Marketing acumen are operating at a deficient.

However, use Digital Marketing in tandem with the other instruments of Marketing to sharpen the focus on your customer. In other words, keep your Marketing diet balanced. Your business and brand will be healthier as a result.

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